IMP Profile - Mitch Stein

Michael:  Mitch Stein wrote back when I was looking for IMPs in the middle of 2006 but in typical Mitch fashion he challenged me to create an interesting Web page with his reply. To be honest, I didn't want to use the same format for every IMP profile but time has not been kind to my schedule. So Mitch, at least, gets a slightly different treatment from other early IMPresponders.

Mitch Stein:  My life has been pretty boring (which is not necessarily a bad thing) since I left the IMPire in the latter 90s when AOL had turned CompuServe into bull excretions. I had been in private practice (clinical psychology) until the early 90s when managed care (which is Lower Slobbovian for "they manage not to care, so live with it") managed to ruin being in private practice, and during my time as an IMP was working a low stress job as the psychologist for a local hospital in their Harvard Mind-Body Medical Institute, which left me plenty of time to write. That crashed and burned in 99, as the hospital was awash in a sea of red ink known in managed care as "nothing is ever medically necessary, so we don't ever have to pay". So, I had to go out and find a REAL job. I ended up going back to state government, where I had begun my career more decades ago than I care to remember, and for the past six years have been in I/O psychology with the state's personnel department. I'm in the research division...in fact I'm the entire research division.

This job leaves me a lot less time to write fiction, although I do quite a bit of "professional writing" in my job, and thanks to Sasha and Lisa Collins manage to dangle only a few participles here and there. And I can occasionally be found wandering the back alleys of a couple of employment law web sites, sometimes dispensing sage advice, but more often contemplating my belly button lint, going "wubba wubba" with my finger and lips, and suggesting that total strangers spend the next twenty-four hours going up to more total strangers and asking, "Have you seen Ichabod?" Or maybe not. :)

Back in my idealistic IMP days, despite the dire warnings of TGR of how tough writing is, I still had hopes (aka delusions) of bursting onto the SF writing scene. So, after five years of trying, and only three sales (of which only two ever got published) I burst all right, or that is my delusional bubble burst as I realized I had earned less than a penny an hour for all my efforts. Thus I've done very little fiction writing the past few years, and what little I did was mostly for my own amusement. I guess once you've caught the writing bug, you never completely lose it. Every now and then it itches so much, you just gotta scratch. Anyway, subscribing to Robert Heinlein's philosophy that the greatest tribute a writer can receive is in the form of the magic words "pay to the order of", and having seen those magic words far too seldom, my delusion received its two cc's of thorazine and I suspended my fiction writing activities. I plan to take early retirement in about five years and just work part-time as an adjunct faculty somewhere teaching one course a semester, so that is when I plan to resume my aborted writing "career" (if you can call being a spectacular failure a "career") and once again burst (aka belly flop) onto the SF writing scene.

Looking forward to hearing from you!
cheers,
Mitch, the former IMP known as Atilla-the-Pun